Leo’s Heaven

Danish is one of the North Germanic languages also called Scandinavian languages, a sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany where it holds the status of minority language.Danish also holds official status and is a mandatory subject in school in the Danish territories of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, which now enjoy limited autonomy. In Iceland and the Faroe Islands, Danish is taught as a compulsory foreign language in schools. There are also Danish language communities in Argentina, the U.S. and Canada.
Danish, together with Swedish, derives from the East Norse dialect group, while Norwegian is classified as a West Norse language together with Faroese and Icelandic. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Danish, Norwegian and Swedish into a Mainland Scandinavian group while Icelandic and Faroese are placed in a separate category labeled Insular Scandinavian.

Written Danish and Norwegian Bokmål are particularly close, though the phonology that is, the system of relationships among the speech sounds that constitute the fundamental components of the language and the prosody the patterns of stress and intonation differ somewhat. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can understand the others, though studies have shown that speakers of Norwegian generally understand both Danish and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand each other. Both Swedes and Danes also understand Norwegian better than they understand each other’s languages.

Norwegian norsk is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is an official language. It is also spoken as a second language among Norwegian-Americans in the USA, especially in the central northern states. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants see Danish language#Classification.

These continental Scandinavian languages together with the insular languages Faroese and Icelandic, as well as some extinct languages, constitute the North Germanic languages also called Scandinavian languages. Faroese and Icelandic are hardly mutually intelligible with Norwegian in their spoken form, because continental Scandinavian has diverged from them.

As established by law and governmental policy, there are two official forms of written Norwegian – Bokmål literally “book language” and Nynorsk literally “new Norwegian”. The Norwegian Language Council recommends the terms “Norwegian Bokmål” and “Norwegian Nynorsk” in English.

There is no officially sanctioned standard of spoken Norwegian, and most Norwegians speak their own dialect in all circumstances. The sociolect of the urban upper and middle class in East Norway, upon which Bokmål is primarily based, can be regarded as a de facto spoken standard for Bokmål.This so-called standard østnorsk “Standard Eastern Norwegian” is the form generally taught to foreign students.

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Danish was the standard written language of Norway. As a result, the development of modern written Norwegian has been subject to strong controversy related to nationalism, rural versus urban discourse, and Norway’s literary history. Historically, Bokmål is a Norwegianized variety of Danish, while Nynorsk is a language form based on Norwegian dialects and puristic opposition to Danish. The now abandoned official policy to merge Bokmål and Nynorsk into one common language called Samnorsk through a series of spelling reforms has created a wide spectrum of varieties of both Bokmål and Nynorsk. The unofficial form known as Riksmål is considered more conservative than Bokmål, and the unofficial Høgnorsk more conservative than Nynorsk.

Norwegians are educated in both Bokmål and Nynorsk. A 2005 poll indicates that 86.3% use primarily Bokmål as their daily written language, 5.5% use both Bokmål and Nynorsk, and 7.5% use primarily Nynorsk.Thus 13% are frequently writing Nynorsk, though the majority speak dialects that resemble Nynorsk more closely than Bokmål.Broadly speaking, nynorsk writing is widespread in Western Norway, though not in major urban areas; it is little used elsewhere. The Norwegian broadcasting corporation (NRK) broadcasts in both Bokmål and Nynorsk, and all governmental agencies are required to support both written languages. Bokmål is used in 92% of all written publications, Nynorsk in 8% (2000).

Norwegian is one of the working languages of the Nordic Council. Under the Nordic Language Convention, citizens of the Nordic countries speaking Norwegian have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable to any interpretation or translation costs.
Main article: Norwegian alphabet
The Norwegian alphabet has 29 letters.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Æ Ø Å
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z æ ø å

The letters c, q, w, x and z are only used in loanwords. Some also spell their otherwise Norwegian family names using these letters.

Some letters may be modified by diacritics: é, è, ê, ó, ò, and ô. In Nynorsk, ì and ù and ỳ are occasionally seen as well. The diacritics are not compulsory, but may in a few cases distinguish between different meanings of the word, e.g.: for (for/to), fór (went), fòr (furrow) and fôr (fodder). Loanwords may be spelled with other diacritics, most notably ü, á and à.

Latvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language. Because of language policy in Latvia approximately 60% of the 900,000 ethnic-minority population of Latvia speak Latvian. The use of the Latvian language in various areas of the social life in Latvia is increasing.

Latvian is a Baltic language and is most closely related to Lithuanian, although the two are not mutually intelligible.

Latvian first appeared in Western print in the mid-16th century with the reproduction of the Lord’s Prayer in Latvian in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia Universalis, in Roman script.
Latvian is one of two living Baltic languages,a group of its own within the Indo-European language family. The Latvian and Lithuanian languages have retained many features of the nominal morphology of the proto-language, though in matters of phonology and verbal morphology they show many innovations, with Latvian being considerably more innovative than Lithuanian.
The Livonian dialect of Latvian was more affected by the Livonian language substratum than Latvian in other parts of Latvia. There are two intonations in the Livonian dialect. In Courland short vowels in the endings of words are discarded, while long vowels are shortened. In all genders and numbers only one form of verb is used. Personal names in both genders are derived with endings - els, -ans. In prefixes ie is changed to e. Due to migration and the introduction of a standardised language this dialect has declined. It arose from assimilated Livonians, who started to speak in Latvian and assimilated Livonian grammar into Latvian.
The Vidzeme variety and the Semigallian variety are closer to each other than to the Curonian variety, which is more archaic than the other two. There are three intonations in the Middle dialect. In the Semigallian variety, ŗ is still used.

Polish, an official language of Poland, has the largest number of speakers of any West Slavic language and, as for all the Slavic languages, its popularity is second only to Russian.Polish-speakers use the language in a uniform manner through most of Poland, and it has a Latin-based orthography. The language developed indigenously and retains many ancient Slavic features of pronunciation and grammar. Although non-Polish administrations in Poland sometimes attempted, historically, to suppress the Polish language, a rich literature has nonetheless developed over the centuries, and many works by Polish authors are available in translations in English and other languages.
Nearly 97% of Poland’s citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue. As a result of World War II Poland has changed its borders, which did not accurately reflect the autotonic ethnic territories of the Polish people. The new borders initiated a series of migrations World War II evacuation and expulsion, German expulsions, Operation Wisła. Ethnic cleansing of the Poles as a result of the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia also resulted in significant demographic changes. Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union after the Second World War retained a significant Polish population unwilling or unable to migrate to post-1945 Poland. Ethnic Poles constitute significant minorities in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Polish is the most widely used minority language in Lithuania’s Vilnius County (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results), and it is also present in other counties. In Ukraine, Polish is most often heard in the Lviv and Lutsk regions. Western Belarus has an significant Polish minority, particularly in the Brest and Grodno regions.

Polish speakers also live in: Argentina, Andorra, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Peru, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Ukraine, UAE, the UK, Uruguay and the United States.

In the United States, it is estimated that citizens of Polish ethnic extraction number more than 11 million, but many no longer speak Polish fluently. According to the United States 2000 Census, 667,414 Americans of age 5 years and over reported Polish as the language spoken at home: about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English, or 0.25% of the U.S. population. The largest concentrations of Polish speakers reported in the census over 50% occur in three states: Illinois 185,749, New York 111,740 and New Jersey.

Canada has a significant Polish Canadian population. The 2006 census recorded 242,885 speakers of Polish, with a significant concentration in the city of Toronto, Ontario.
Polish has six oral and two nasal vowels. The Polish consonant system shows more complexity: its characteristic features include the series of affricates and palatal consonants that resulted from four Proto-Slavic palatalizations and two further palatalizations which took place in Polish and Belarusian. The stress falls generally on the penultimate second to last syllable.

Romanian or Daco-Romanian; self-designation is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people,primarily in Romania and Moldova. It has official status in Romania, Moldova, and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia. While the language is used in Moldova, there it is officially called the Moldovan language for political reasons.

Romanian speakers are scattered across many other countries, notably Italy, Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Portugal, United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France, and Germany.
The Dacians, an Indo-European people, were the ancient inhabitants of Romanian territory. They were defeated by the Romans in 106, and part of Dacia Oltenia, Banat, and Transylvania became a Roman province. This province, which was rich in ores, especially silver and gold,was colonized by the Romans,who brought with them Vulgar Latin as the language of administration and commerce, and who started a period of intense romanization, which gave birth to the proto-Romanian language.But in the 3rd century AD, under the pressure of Free Dacians and from invasions of migratory populations such as Goths, the Roman Empire was forced to withdraw from Dacia, in 271 AD, leaving it to the Goths.It is a matter of debate whether modern-day Romanians are descendants of the people that abandoned the area and settled south of the Danube or of the romanized people that remained in Dacia.See also Origin of the Romanians.
Owing to its people’s geographical isolation, Romanian was probably among the first of the Romance languages to split from Latin. It received little influence from other Romance languages until the modern period until the middle of the 18th century, and is therefore one of the most uniform languages in Europe. It is the most important of the remaining Eastern Romance languages and is more conservative than other Romance languages in nominal morphology. Romanian has preserved a part of the Latin declension, but whereas Latin had six cases, Romanian has three: the nominative-accusative, the genitive-dative, and marginally the vocative. Romanian nouns also preserve the neuter gender. However, the verb morphology of Romanian has shown the same move towards a compound perfect and future tense as the other Romance languages.
All the dialects of Romanian are believed to have been unified in a Proto-Romanian language up to sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries, when the area came under the influence of the Byzantine Empire. It was then that Romanian became influenced by the Slavic languages and to some degree the Greek. For example, Aromanian, one of the closest relatives of Romanian, has very few Slavic words. Also, the variations in the Daco-Romanian dialect spoken throughout Romania and Moldova are very small. The use of this uniform Daco-Romanian dialect extends well beyond the borders of the Romanian state: a Romanian-speaker from Moldova speaks the same language as a Romanian-speaker from the Serbian Banat. Romanian was influenced by Slavic due to migration/assimilation, and feudal/ecclesiastical relations, Greek Byzantine, then Phanariote, Turkish, and Hungarian, while the other Romance languages adopted words and features of Germanic.
The Dacian language was an Indo-European language spoken by the ancient Dacians. It may have been the first language to influence the Latin spoken in Dacia, but little is known about it. About 300 words found only in Romanian or with a cognate in the Albanian language may be inherited from Dacian, many of them being related to pastoral life. Some linguists have asserted that Albanians are Dacians who were not romanized and migrated southward.

A different view is that these non-Latin words are not necessarily Dacian, but rather were brought into the territory that is modern Romania by Romance-speaking shepherds migrating north from Albania, Serbia, and northern Greece who became the Romanian people. However, the Eastern Romance substratum appears to have been a satem language, while the Paleo-Balkan languages spoken in northern Greece and Albania were most likely centum languages. The general opinion is that Dacian was a satem language, as was Thracian, which, however, was indeed spoken in the south.

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine; its dialects such as Surzhyk and Balachka are spoken in Ukraine and some parts of Russia. Written Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. The language shares some vocabulary with the languages of the neighboring Slavic nations, most notably with Polish, Slovak in the West and Belarusan, Russian in the North and the East.

The Ukrainian language traces its origins to the Old Slavic language of the early medieval state of Kievan Rus’. In its earlier stages it was called Ruthenian by the western Europe. Ukrainian is a lineal descendant of the colloquial language used in Kievan Rus

The language has persisted despite several periods of bans and/or discouragement throughout centuries as it has always maintained a sufficient base among the people of Ukraine, its folklore songs, itinerant musicians, and prominent authors.
It is accepted that before the eighteenth century the precursor to the modern literary Ukrainian language was a vernacular language used mostly by peasants and petits bourgeois as no traces of earlier literary works could be found. It existed along with Church Slavonic, a literary language of religion that evolved from the Old Slavonic.

The earliest literary work in the modern Ukrianian language was recorded in 1798 when Ivan Kotlyarevsky published his epic poem, Eneyida, a burlesque in Ukrainian, based on Virgil’s Aeneid. His book was published in vernacular Ukrainian and in satiric way to avoid being censored, and is the earliest known Ukrainian published book to survive through Imperial and, later, Soviet policies on the Ukrainian language.
Beyond the polemics between several ideological conceptions, the continuous presence of Slavic settlements in Ukraine, since at least the sixth century, provides an underlying ethno-linguistic factual basis for the origins of the Ukrainian language. The westernmost areas of modern-day Ukraine lay to the south of the postulated homeland of the original Slavs.

Immigration of Slavic tribes to the Western Slavic and Southern Slavic portions of Eastern Europe led to the dissolution of Early Common Slavic into three groups by the seventh century. During this time period, some East Slavic elements could have provided a Slavic identity to the Antes civilization.
In the Russian Empire Census of 1897 the following picture emerged, with Ukrainian being the second most spoken language of the Russian Empire. According to the Imperial census’s terminology, the Russian language Russkij was subdivided into Ukrainian Malorusskij, ‘Little Russian, what we know as Russian today Vjelikorusskij, ‘Great Russian’, and Belarusian Bjelorusskij, ‘White Russian’.

The following table shows the distribution of settlement by native language in 1897, in Russian Empire governorates which had more than 100,000 Ukrainian speakers.

The Slovak language, sometimes incorrectly called “Slovakian”, is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages (together with Czech, Polish, Silesian, Kashubian, and Sorbian).

The Czech and Slovak languages are mutually intelligible which means that even after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia Czech may be used in all official proceedings and documents in Slovakia, and vice versa.

Slovak is spoken in Slovakia (by 5 million people), the United States (500,000), the Czech Republic (320,000), northern Serbia (60,000), Ireland (30,000), Romania (22,000), Hungary (20,000), Poland (20,000), Canada (20,000), Croatia (5,000), Australia, Austria, Ukraine, and Bulgaria.
The primary principle of Slovak spelling is the phonemic principle, “Write as you hear”. The secondary principle is the morphological principle: forms derived from the same stem are written in the same way even if they are pronounced differently. An example of this principle is the assimilation rule (see below). The tertiary principle is the etymological principle, which can be seen in the use of i after certain consonants and of y after other consonants, although both i and y are pronounced the same way. Finally there is the rarely applied grammatical principle, under which, for example, there is a difference in writing (but not in the pronunciation) between the basic singular and plural form of masculine adjectives, for example pekný (nice – sg.) vs pekní (nice – pl.), both pronounced [pekniː].

Most foreign words receive Slovak spelling immediately or after some time. For example, “weekend” is víkend, “software” is softvér (not exclusively), and “quality” is spelled kvalita (possibly from Italian qualità). Personal and geographical names from other languages using Latin alphabets keep their original spelling, unless there is a fully Slovak form for the name (for example Londýn for “London”).

Slovak orthography has changed many times. One of the most important changes was after World War II when s began to be written as z where pronounced asin prefixes, for example smluva into zmluva, sväz into zväz. (That is, the phonemic principle has been given priority over the etymological principle in this case.)

The Slovak alphabet is often used to transcribe Ukrainian or Russian into the Latin alphabet.

The Slovak language has distinctive palatalization. Among the Slavic languages that do not use the Latin alphabet, Slovak is the closest to Rusyn and then to Ukrainian and Russian. Many Slovak words are familiar to Ruthenian speakers and to a much lesser extent, Ukrainian speakers

Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.

Bulgarian demonstrates several linguistic innovations that set it apart from all other Slavic languages except Macedonian, such as the elimination of case declension, the development of a suffixed definite article, the lack of a verb infinitive, and the retention and further development of the proto-Slavic verb system. Various verb forms exist to express unwitnessed, retold, and doubtful action. Estimates of the number of people around the world who speak Bulgarian fluently range from about 9 million to 12 million.
Main article: History of Bulgarian
The development of the Bulgarian language may be divided into several historical periods.

Prehistoric period - occurred between the Slavonic migration to eastern Balkans and the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to Great Moravia in the 860s.
Old Bulgarian - a literary norm of the early southern dialect of the Common Slavic language from which Bulgarian evolved. It was used by Saints Cyril and Methodius and their disciples to translate the Bible and other liturgical literature from Greek into Slavic.
Middle Bulgarian (12th to 15th century) - a literary norm that evolved from the earlier Old Bulgarian, after major innovations were accepted. It was a language of rich literary activity and the official administration language of the Second Bulgarian Empire.
Modern Bulgarian - dates from the 16th century onwards, undergoing general grammar and syntax changes in the 18th and 19th centuries. Present-day written Bulgarian language was standardized on the basis of the 19th-century Bulgarian vernacular. The historical development of the Bulgarian language can be described as a transition from a highly synthetic language to a typical analytic language with Middle Bulgarian as a midpoint in this transition.
In most sources in and out of Bulgaria before the Second World War, the southern Slavonic dialect continuum covering the area of today’s Republic of Macedonia were referred to as a group of Bulgarian dialects. The local variants of the name of the language are balgàrtski, bolgàrtski, bulgàrtski, bògartski, bogàrtski, bùgarski or bugàrski.

After WWII, the question about the Bulgarian character of the language in the territory of the Republic of Macedonia was put aside in the name of Bulgarian-Yugoslavian friendship under the pressure of the Soviet Union. After 1958 when the pressure from Moscow decreased, Sofia turned back to the view that the Macedonian language did not exist as a separate language.

Slovene or Slovenian is a South Slavic language spoken by approximately 2.4 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. Slovene is one of the 23 official and working languages of the European Union.

Standard Slovene is the national language that evolved from the Central Slovene dialects in the 18th century and consolidated itself through the 19th and 20th century. While distinct regional varieties descended from the older rural dialects still exist, the spoken and written language is uniform and standardized. Some dialects differ considerably from the standard language in grammar and vocabulary. Though not facing imminent extinction, such dialects have been in decline during the past century, despite the fact that they are well researched and their use is often encouraged by local authorities.

The distinctive characteristics of Slovene are dual grammatical number, two accentual norms, one characterized by pitch accent, and abundant inflection. Although Slovene is basically a SVO language, word order is very flexible, often adjusted for emphasis or stylistic reasons. Slovene has a T-V distinction: second-person plural forms are used for individuals as a sign of respect. Also, Slovene and Slovak are the two modern Slavic languages whose names for themselves literally mean “Slavic”.
Alongside Croatian and Serbian, Slovene is an Indo-European language belonging to the Western subgroup of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages. It transitions to the Kajkavian and Čakavian dialect of Croatian, but is less close to the Štokavian dialect, the basis for the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian standard language.
Slovene, much like the other Slavic languages, Baltic languages, German, Dutch and most Romance languages, uses two forms of ‘you’ for formal and informal situations. Informal ti is comparable to the archaic English thou and is used in common situations; that is, when speaking to one’s peers or inferiors; formal vi is comparable to the archaic English ye as it is used in formal situations such as when speaking to one’s superiors, generally any adult acquaintances, all adults who are in a higher position at work, and so forth. As with many other languages that make a T-V distinction, the formal form is treated grammatically as the second-person plural form

Standard Tibetan, often called Central Tibetan, is the official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It is based on the speech of Lhasa, an Ü-Tsang dialect of dBus, one of the Central Tibetan languages. The written language is based on Classical Tibetan and is highly conservative.
Verbs do not inflect for person or number. Morphologically there are up to four separate stem forms, which the Tibetan grammarians, influenced by Sanskrit grammatical terminology, call the “present, “past”, “future”, and “imperative”, although the precise semantics of these stems is still controversial. The so-called future stem is not a true future, but conveys the sense of necessity or obligation.

The majority of Tibetan verbs fall into one of two categories, those which express implicitly or explicitly the involvement of an agent, marked in a sentence by the instrumental particle and those expressing an action which does not involve an agent. Tibetan grammarians refer to these categories as tha-dad-pa and tha-mi-dad-pa respectively. Although these two categories often seem to overlap with the English grammatical concepts of transitive and intransitive, most modern writers on Tibetan grammar have adopted the terms “voluntary” and “involuntary”, based on native Tibetan descriptions. Most involuntary verbs lack an imperative stem.

Many verbs exhibit stem ablaut among the four stem forms, thus a or e in the present tends to become o in the imperative byed, byas, bya, byos ‘to do’), an e in the present changes to a in the past and future; in some verbs a present in i changes to u in the other stems. Additionally, the stems of verbs are also distinguished by the addition of various prefixes and suffixes, thus sgrub, bsgrubs, bsgrub, sgrubs. Though the final -s suffix, when used, is quite regular for the past and imperative, the specific prefixes to be used with any given verb are less predictable; while there is a clear pattern of b- for a past stem and g- for a future stem, this usage is not consistent.

Only a limited number of verbs are capable of four changes; some cannot assume more than three, some two, and many only one. This relative deficiency is made up by the addition of auxiliaries or suffixes both in the classical language and in the modern dialects.

Verbs are negated by two prepositional particles: mi and ma. Mi is used with present and future stems. The particle ma is used with the past stem, and with the imperative in Classical Tibetan, although in modern Tibetan, prohibitions do not employ the imperative stem, rather the present stem is negated with ma due to the collapse of the four part verbal system in many cases. There is also a negative stative verb med ‘there is not, there does not exist’, the counterpart to the stative verb yod ‘there is, there exists’

As with nouns, Tibetan also has a complex system of honorific and polite verbal forms, paralleling those found in Japanese. Thus, many verbs for everyday actions have a completely different form to express the superior status, whether actual or out of courtesy, of the agent of the action, thus lta ’see’, hon. gzigs; byed ‘do’, hon. mdzad. Where a specific honorific verb stem does not exist, the same effect is brought about by compounding a standard verbal stem with an appropriate general honorific stem such as mdzad.